Lightning storms make it rain diamonds on Saturn and Jupiter

It sounds like a wacky fantasy, but scientists believe that it
rains diamonds in the clouds of Saturn and Jupiter.

Diamonds are made from highly compressed and heated carbon.
Theoretically, if you took a charcoal bricket out of your grill
and heated it and pressed it hard enough for long enough, you
could make a diamond. (Good luck with that.)

On Earth, diamonds form
about 100 miles underground. Volcanic magma highways then
bring them closer to the surface, providing us with shiny
gemstones that we stick in rings and ear studs.

But in the dense atmospheres of planets like Jupiter and Saturn,
whose massive size generates enormous amounts of gravity, crazy
amounts of pressure and heat can squeeze carbon in mid-air — and
make it rain diamonds.

Scientists have speculated for years that diamonds are abundant
in the cores of the smaller, cooler gas giants, Neptune and
Uranus. They believed that the larger gaseous planets, Jupiter
and Saturn, didn't have suitable atmospheres to forge diamonds.

But when researchers recently analyzed the pressures and
temperatures for Jupiter's and Saturn's atmospheres, then modeled
how carbon would behave, they determined that diamond rain is
very likely.

Diamonds seem especially likely to form in huge, storm-ravaged
regions of Saturn, and in enormous quantities — Kevin Baines, a
researcher at University of Madison-Wisconsin and NASA JPL,
told BBC
News it may rain as much as 2.2 million pounds of diamonds
there every year.

The diamonds start out as methane gas. Powerful lightning storms
on the two huge gas giants then zap it into carbon soot.

"As the soot falls, the pressure on it increases," Baines told
the BBC. "And after about 1,000 miles it turns to graphite - the
sheet-like form of carbon you find in pencils."

And the graphite keeps falling. When it reaches the deep
atmosphere of Saturn, for example — around 3,700 miles down — the
immense pressure squeezes the carbon into diamonds, which float
in seas of liquid methane and hydrogen.

Eventually the gems sink toward the interior of the planet (a
depth of 18,600 miles), where nightmarish pressure and heat melts
the diamonds into molten carbon.

"Once you get down to those extreme depths," Baines told the BBC,
"the pressure and temperature is so hellish, there's no way the
diamonds could remain solid."

But before you start building a Jupiter- or Saturn-bound
diamond-speculating ship with De Beers, keep in mind: All that
crushing pressure and searing heat would destroy any Earthly
vehicle long before it got close to those clouds full of
sparkling riches.